Bones
by greeniethewritermouse
Summary: Harry Potter is invited to tag along with his guardian, Dr. Alan Grant, when he is invited to an island preserve off the coast of Costa Rica.
1. Chapter 1

**Bones**

**Chapter One: Discoveries and Disruptions**

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Jurassic Park in either its book or movie format. Anything you recognize was paraphrased or taken directly from the Jurassic Park Screenplay or from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park novel.

* * *

It was hot. Maybe that went without saying as there was barely more than a shrub for miles around to keep the beating afternoon sun off them. Still at over one hundred degrees Harry thought the statement bore repeating. It was hot. Damn hot.

Harry adjusted his baseball cap and gave his ragged ponytail a judicious yank to keep it from disintegrating in the moaning gusts of high wind. He tugged the bandana that provided him some protection against the alkaline dust away from his nose and mouth and took a deep breath of the slightly fresher air in relief stretching out his cramping neck and back muscles.

Not a foot away from him Dr. Alan Grant crouched low with his nose mere inches from the ground. Alan was oblivious to the rivulets of sweat running down his neck and dripping onto the ground, all of his concentration was taken by the six inch square of earth he'd claimed for himself. He'd found something. After almost four years Harry had become very familiar with that single-minded intensity that meant a discovery, the way Alan was carefully daubing away at the earth with a dental pick and a soft brush was telltale.

Harry grinned when Alan reached for the rubber cement and stood to stretch his legs after being crouched down for so long. His own six inch square was empty so far and they would probably be bringing out the imaging equipment soon anyway.

Harry and Alan were perched on a hillside in the badlands not too far from Snakewater, Montana with nothing but blue sky and untold layers of eroding limestone and shale to see in any direction. It was beautiful in its own way, bleak and barren and harsh, of course, but what you saw was what you got. Harry could appreciate that.

According to Alan, back when the dinosaurs they were excavating had lived the land that they were standing on had been the shore of an enormous inland sea that had stretched from the Rockies to the Appalachians, covering the entirety of the American west in tepid water and giving rise to swampy bayou along the edges that was all about concealment. If you got Ellie going about it you were liable to get an excited earful about just what kind of plant made up which patch of green, botanists were like that Harry had discovered.

Harry glanced down at their camp. It was Harry, Alan, Ellie, three grad students and two undergrad students from the University of Denver who lived in camp proper. Alan and Harry bunked in the trailer that served as their field lab and office and Ellie and the students each got a four pole tipi, the only kind of tent that stood up in the face of the brutal winds. The camp was only semi-permanent, because in most cases it was easier to move up close to where the fossils were rather than bringing them back to camp, but they'd been parked in the same little gully at the base of the hillside for a week and a half.

Down below Ellie kicked open the stubborn door to the trailer with a clang that jolted him out of his musings, and waved at him.

"Harry," she called, her voice bouncing eerily off the hills.

"Yeah?"

"Get Alan down here would you? He's got a call. Sounds like it might be urgent."

"'Kay."

Harry shot her a thumbs-up and moved back over to where Alan had finished uncovering the better part of a tiny, impossibly fragile looking jaw bone complete with a classic set of carnivore dentition. He was almost reluctant to interrupt. He knew just how much Alan had been looking forward to a discovery like this one, a chance to look at the nesting habits of carnivorous species when up until now they'd only found herbivores. Still the fossil had been waiting for at least sixty-five million years to be discovered, it could wait another few minutes while Alan took a phone call. With that in mind Harry nudged his guardian with the toe of his hiking boot, kicking up a small plume of white dust on contact.

"Alan. Hey Alan."

"What?" grunted Alan shooting Harry an annoyed glare from under his beaten up old cowboy hat.

"Ellie says there's a call for you. She says it's probably important."

A little bit of a white lie, but Alan wasn't about to leave his site without a prod and Harry wasn't above prodding.

With a put-upon sigh Alan stood, wincing as his joints creaked in protest after spending so long in the same position. The sunglasses came on and he tugged off his red bandana, using it to mop the sweat from his neck and brow and then tucking it into his back pocket carelessly.

"Mm. What time is it?"

"Er…around one. We've been up here for a good three or four hours now."

Alan looked surprised to hear that and glanced down at his watch and then up at the sun for confirmation.

"Huh. Alright, alright. Get Darren and Quinn up here with the Thumper and then come and get something to eat before we start digging again."

"Can do," agreed Harry, dashing off.

Darren and Quinn were both pretty cool if you were to ask Harry's opinion. Darren was a one of the grad students and had been with Alan's dig for two seasons now, tall and sun-bleached blond, he was one of Alan's most promising protégés. He'd transferred out of Georgia State University after his undergraduate and been accepted into Alan's lab almost immediately and had been based out of Denver for three years now but he still ran around with his twanging accent, hippy-esque ponytail and his redneck slang. And since Alan was less than impressed with Harry's ponytail emulation he tried to keep his diction from sliding as well.

Quinn was a newbie to the dig, a short Korean boy from Chicago in his third year majoring in something complicated to do with computer imaging. Despite his unmitigated computer nerd status he sported a dark tan, apparently the product of his unflagging love for baseball, and straight white teeth. Alan hadn't been too keen on him tagging along this year but Professor Gibbons had bullied his imaging equipment into the dig and they needed someone who could actually use the stuff. Quinn ended up fitting in with the rest of them right away, he was a fair genius with a computer and besides all that he was funny and enthusiastic.

The two of them were at Quinn's station sifting through the data on the herbivore excavations that had just been completed looking at things like depth and strata composition.

"Hey kid," said Darren tugging at the ratty end of Harry's ponytail affectionately.

"Hey, Alan wants the Thumper and the imaging equipment up by where we were digging just now. It looks like we've finally got ourselves a baby carnivore."

"It's about time," cheered Quinn, giving Harry a loud smacking high-five and then promptly flicking the brim of his worn green baseball cap, just so that Harry remembered his place in the whole scheme of things.

"What's the species? Do we know?" asked Darren, the same manic light of discovery that afflicted all true scientists entering his eyes.

"Alan didn't say and we don't have enough of the fossil uncovered yet for me to tell for sure," said Harry with a noncommittal shrug.

"It's gotta be a raptor," Darren insisted, "This is the perfect environment for them according to all the popular theories and Dr. Grant's own work. We've been looking for so long, it has to be."

"If you would stop drooling over the idea of it for two seconds and come and help me with this we'd know for sure," grumbled Quinn struggling with a heavy looking piece of computer equipment.

"Right," said Darren shaking his head and shooting Quinn a sheepish grin, "Here let me help with that."

"We're taking a short break, so how long will it take you guys to get set up?" asked Harry.

"If this guy stops spacing out on me I can have the probe in the ground in an hour, maybe less," Quinn answered taking a swig from his water canteen and then bending to unplug a bunch of cables.

"Great, I'll tell Alan and you guys call us when you're ready."

Darren grunted something vaguely affirmative in answer and with that Harry turned and made his way across camp, bypassing the flapping and fluttering of the mess tent, and headed straight to the trailer.

Alan wasn't in the trailer taking the call, as Harry had expected, instead his guardian was watching as a sedan, that had probably once been blue but after traversing the rutted dirt and, occasionally, gravel path that served as a road out here had been turned a dusty beige color, wind its way up the path.

"A visitor?" said Harry.

"A lawyer," answered Alan, wetting his bandana and using it to mop at the sweat on the back of his neck.

Harry immediately stiffened. He didn't like lawyers, well, not that anyone particularly liked lawyers he supposed, but he especially didn't like them.

Almost five years ago he hadn't lived with Alan, instead he'd been living in Surrey with his closest living relatives his mother's sister Petunia and her husband and son. It had been horrible. Harry hadn't even realized just how horrible it had been until one of the teachers in his primary school had brought him home one day and threatened to call social services on his aunt and uncle.

His aunt had immediately called all her relatives, there weren't many, trying to find someone who would take him off their hands before Mrs. McKinney could file her lawsuit and eventually Alan had agreed to take him. What had followed was a long line of lawyers both British and American who alternately wanted to bring him back to the Dursleys and put him in foster care.

Alan had always managed to turn them away with his good stable job and his stubborn refusal to believe that their odd way of living was damaging Harry's development no matter how many social workers and child psychologists told him otherwise. Especially when he pointed out to them that he wasn't the one making Harry sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. Though no one actually had enough evidence to bring the Dursleys to trial for neglect and endangerment of a minor, Harry's doctor was always quick to point out that Harry was short for his age and this was likely because of malnutrition and had previously had untreated hairline fractures in the bones of his arms, hands, feet and ribs.

This past year and a half had been completely lawyer free though and Harry had been hoping that the matter was closed for discussion, as Ellie would say.

"Relax kiddo," said Alan, settling one big rough hand on the top of Harry's head, "This guy is from the EPA, and somehow I don't think you fall under their jurisdiction. I forgot I was supposed to meet with him today until I got a look at the calendar."

"I want to stay with you," Harry said quietly.

"Ellie's grabbing the three of us some sandwiches from the mess," was all that Alan said but he drew Harry closer to lean against his hip.

As the sedan bounced its way into camp the students working on the next hill over, breaking up bigger stones with a jackhammer, looked up from their work, curiously. They didn't get many visitors so it was always a big production when they had them. The older grad students usually managed to drag their families out here for a couple of days out of the summer, case in point the somewhat shiny green Pathfinder and the presence of the incredibly obnoxious Geordie in camp. Geordie and his father had been here for three days and already Harry was counting the days until they were gone.

With the strange brand of adult logic that Harry was glad Alan didn't subscribe to, Bethie and her husband had decided that since Geordie and Harry were around the same age they should hang out and play together. Harry had been willing to play nicely, even though he'd never gotten on with kids his own age, but Geordie's lack of interest in anything to do with dinosaurs had made the effort a chore and he'd been avoiding the kid all day.

The slam of a car door jolted Harry out of his musings, and he watched with some amusement as the lawyer coughed on the cloud of white dust that action generated.

He recovered quickly and strode over to where Alan and Harry were standing.

"Bob Morris, Environmental Protection Agency," he said briskly, extending his hand, "I'm with the San Francisco office."

"Dr. Alan Grant," said Alan, shaking his hand firmly, "My kid, Harry. You look hot, want a beer?"

"God, yes. That would be fantastic."

"Come on, my office is over here."

Morris was in his late twenties and had the typical slick look of a lawyer, sleek suit, stylish haircut, leather briefcase and black wingtips that crunched on the rocks as they picked their way over to the trailer. He was dripping in sweat but hadn't removed his jacket.

"You find the place alright?"

"Yeah, but when I first came over the hill there I thought this was an Indian reservation," Morris commented jerking a thumb at the tipis.

"Nah, it's just the best way to live out here. When we started coming out here we had the funding for top of the line octahedral tents that they use on the mountains but they kept on getting blown away. Finally we figured out that the tipis were the best way to go, we got a few of the Blackfoot four poles set up, and they were nearly perfect. The Sioux use the three pole tipis but we figured that since the Blackfoot were native to the area—"

"Uh huh," said Morris. "Very fitting."

Using one hand to shade his eyes he squinted out over the desolate landscape and shook his head.

"How long have you guys been out here?"

"'Bout sixty cases," said Alan automatically.

Morris turned and shot him a look and Alan, realizing his mistake, elaborated.

"We don't keep great track of the days so we started measuring it by cases of beer. We start out in June with a hundred cases, we've gone through about sixty of them."

"Sixty-three to be exact," Ellie put in from where she was leaning against the door of the trailer, two plastic wrapped sandwiches from the mess in hand, "Here you go boys." She added, lobbing the sandwiches at Harry and Alan.

Harry caught his sandwich deftly and grinned as Morris openly gaped at Ellie. She was dressed in cutoff shorts and a dusty blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up that she had tied off at her midriff. She was twenty-six and very pretty, her dark tan contrasted strikingly with her sun-lightened blonde hair.

"Thanks Ellie. This is Bob Morris. Mr. Morris, Dr. Ellie Sattler."

"Hey," greeted Morris, still looking a bit stunned.

"Ellie keeps us going," Alan said shooting her a fond smile, "She's very good at what she does, just received her doctorate last year."

"What does she do?" asked Morris

"Paleobotany," answered Ellie. "And I still do the standard field preps."

She wiggled the door to the trailer open and they followed her inside.

The trailer had air-conditioning but that was really all that could be said about it. Still, the air was cooler than it was outside even if it did smell strongly of vinegar. The trailer sported two rooms and a bathroom, the first room was the bulk of the trailer, a series of long wooden tables dominated the area littered with neatly tagged specimens and bits of bone fragment in ceramic dishes.

"I thought dinosaurs were supposed to be big," said Morris his eyes flicking over the bones.

"They were," said Ellie, "But everything you see here comes from babies. This site is so important primarily because it was a dinosaur nesting site. Before we started out work here only one other nesting site had been found in the Gobi Desert. Here we've discovered a dozen different hadrosaur nests complete with eggs and the bones of infants and juveniles."

While Ellie showed Morris the acetic acid baths they used to remove the limestone from the delicate bones Alan went to the fridge and grabbed three beers and Harry moved to the back end of the trailer which sported two worn couches, a coffee table, a desk complete with small personal computer, fax machine, telephone and piles of unfiled papers. Behind a beaded screen was Harry and Alan's room which sported nothing more than two cots crammed in side by side and a pair of open duffel bags.

"They look like chicken bones," Morris said, peering into the shallow basin and wrinkling his nose at the smell.

"Yes, they're very birdlike."

"What about the ones outside?"

Ellie glanced to the window, you could just make out the pile of large hadrosaur bones wrapped neatly in plastic through the grime.

"Rejects," she said with a shrug, "They were too fragmentary when we dug them up. We used to discard them but nowadays they get sent to a lab for genetic testing."

"Genetic testing? Really?"

"Here you go," Alan interrupted handing Morris his beer, and tossing Ellie the second one, "We can talk over here."

Alan flopped down on the couch next to Harry and a cloud of dust rose up as he propped his booted feet on the edge of the coffee table and took a swig of beer.

Morris dusted off a small section on the second couch the best that he could and then sat primly, gulping down a good swig of his beer. He glanced at Harry who was already tucking into his sandwich, dismissing him in the next breath, and then back over his shoulder at Ellie, who was picking bones out of the acid bath with a pair of long handled tweezers and was paying them no mind.

Finally, he opened his briefcase and rummaged through it bringing out a few papers and a legal notepad.

"You're probably wondering why I'm here Dr. Grant."

"It's a long way to come Mr. Morris," said Alan fixing the lawyer with an unreadable but undeniably piercing look.

"Well, then I'll get right down to it," said Morris, leveling an equally serious look at Alan, "The EPA is concerned about the activities of the Hammond Foundation. I'm given to understand you receive no small sum of funding from them."

"Fifty thousand a year for the past five years," agreed Alan, "They've been one of our biggest supporters."

"Do you know why they've been so generous? As I'm sure you're aware that the Hammond Foundation invests an inordinate amount in funding dinosaur research."

Alan snorted, taking a swig of his beer.

"That's because old Hammond is a dinosaur nut."

"You've met John Hammond then, in person?"

"Once or twice," shrugged Alan, "He's come down to see the dig a couple of times, but he's elderly. He's also eccentric the way the obscenely rich sometimes are but he's seemed genuinely enthusiastic the few times he's been here. Why?"

"Well," said Morris pausing slightly, "The Hammond Foundation is actually a very mysterious organization."

He handed Alan a map marked with red here and there across the top.

"Look here, these are all digs that the Hammond Foundation has financed in the past year. Notice anything odd?"

Before Alan could say anything Morris ploughed on.

"They're all located in the north. Not a single dig below the forty-fifth parallel, it's all Montana, Canada, Sweden, Alaska and it's the same year after year. Nothing in Utah or Colorado or Mexico ever gets funded. The EPA want to know why that is."

Alan rifled through the maps, frowning at them.

"That's certainly strange if it's true, there's some good research coming out of the warmer climates—"

"Oh it's true," Morris asserted, leaning forward in his seat and tapping the edge of the maps with a finger, "We've been very thorough about cross-checking this information. But that's not even the end of the story, there are other mysteries, like, just what do dinosaurs have to do with amber?"

"Amber?"

"It's the fossilized resin of tree—"

"I know what it is, but why do you care?"

"Because," Morris said, "over the last five years, Hammond has purchased enormous quantities of amber in America, Europe, and Asia, including many pieces of museum-quality jewelry. The foundation has spent seventeen million dollars on amber. They now possess the largest privately held stock of this material in the world."

"I don't get it."

"Neither does anybody else," Morris said. "As far as we can tell, it doesn't make any sense at all. Amber is easily synthesized. It has no commercial or defense value. There's no reason to stockpile it. But Hammond has done just that, over many years. That's what makes it so suspicious."

"Amber," Alan said, shaking his head.

"And what about his island in Costa Rica?" Morris continued, on a roll now, gesticulating wildly. "Ten years ago, the Hammond Foundation leased an island from the government of Costa Rica. Supposedly to set up a biological preserve—"

"I don't know anything about that," Alan said, frowning.

"I haven't been able to find out much," Morris said. "The island is a hundred miles off the west coast. It's very rugged, and it's in an area of ocean where the combinations of wind and current make it almost perpetually covered in fog. They used to call it Cloud Island. Isla Nublar. Apparently the Costa Ricans were amazed that anybody would want it."

Morris went rummaging around in his briefcase again.

"The reason I mention it," he said, "Where is that—ah, here we go. The reason I mention it is that, according to the records, you were paid a consultant's fee in connection with this island."

"I was?"

Morris passed a sheet of paper to Alan and Harry leaned over to get a better look. It was a photocopy of a check issued in March from InGen Inc. Made out to Alan Grant in the amount of twelve thousand dollars. At the lower corner, the check was marked consultant services/Costa Rica/juvenile hyperspace.

Some of the confusion cleared from Alan's face as he handed the photocopy and the maps back to Morris, who tucked them neatly back away in his briefcase.

"I remember that. It was weird as hell, but I remember it. And it didn't have anything to do with an island that I was aware of."

"Can you tell me about it?"

"Sure. It was in 1984. I had just published my first findings about hadrosaur nesting habits and was something of a celebrity. Everyone loved the idea of motherly dinosaurs and cute baby dinosaurs. It was a nightmare of turning down interviews and books deals and other nonsense. InGen approached me around that time looking for a consultant."

"Had you heard of InGen before?" Morris asked.

"No."

"How did they contact you?"

"I got a phone call at my offices at the university. It was a man named Gennaro or Gennino, something like that."

Morris nodded as though he'd been expecting that response.

"Donald Gennaro," he said. "He's the legal counsel for InGen."

"Anyway, he wanted to know about eating habits of dinosaurs. And he offered me a fee to draw up a paper for him. Gennaro was particularly interested in young dinosaurs. Infants and juveniles. What they ate. I guess he thought I would know about that," said Alan shaking his head and taking a swig from his beer and setting the empty can on the floor in easy reach.

"Did you?"

"Not really, no, and I told him that. We had found lots of skeletal material, but we had very little dietary data. But Gennaro said he knew we hadn't published everything, and he wanted whatever we had. And he offered a very large fee. Fifty thousand dollars."

Morris took out a tape recorder and set it on the coffee table. "You mind?"

"No, go ahead."

"So Gennaro phoned you in 1984. What happened then?"

"Well," Grant said. "You see our operation here. Fifty thousand would support two full summers of digging with the right budgeting so I told him I'd do what I could."

"So you agreed to prepare a paper for him?"

"Yes."

"On the dietary habits of juvenile dinosaurs?"

"Yes."

"Did you meet with Gennaro? Deal with him personally?"

"No. Just on the phone."

"Did Gennaro say why he wanted this information?"

"Yes, actually," Alan said. "He was planning a museum for children, and he wanted to feature baby dinosaurs, appealing to the age group or something. He said he was hiring a number of academic consultants, and named them. There were paleontologists like me, and a mathematician from Texas named Ian Malcolm, and a couple of ecologists. A systems analyst. Good group. Bright minds."

Morris nodded, making notes. "So you accepted the consultancy?"

"Yes. I'd agreed to send him a summary of our work to start out with, what we knew about the habits of the duckbilled hadrosaurs we'd found things like that."

"What kind of information did you send?" Morris asked.

"Everything: nesting behavior, territorial ranges, feeding behavior, social behavior. Everything."

"And how did Gennaro respond? Was he satisfied?"

"He kept calling and calling." Said Alan with a scowl, "Sometimes in the middle of the night. Would the dinosaurs eat this? Would they eat that? Should the exhibit include this? I could never understand why he was so worked up. I mean, I think dinosaurs are important, too, but not that important. They've been dead sixty-five million years. You'd think his calls could wait until morning."

"I see," Morris said. "And the fifty thousand dollars?"

Alan shook his head again.

"I got tired of Gennaro and called the whole thing off. We settled up for twelve thousand. That must have been about the middle of '85. By then I had Harry to think about and it just wasn't worth the headache."  
Morris made a note.

"And InGen? Any other contact with them?"

"Not since 1985."

"And when did the Hammond Foundation begin to fund your research?"

"I'd have to look to be positive," Alan said. "But it was around then. Mid-eighties."

"And you know Hammond as just a rich dinosaur enthusiast."

"Yes."

Morris made another note.

"Look," Alan said. "If the EPA is so concerned about John Hammond and what he's doing-the dinosaur sites in the north, the amber purchases, the island in Costa Rica-why don't you just ask him about it? He's easy enough to get talking, believe me."

"At the moment, we can't," Morris said.

"Why not?" Grant said.

"Because we don't have any evidence of wrongdoing, and if he did say something incriminating he could try and sue us for entrapment," Morris said. "But personally, I think it's clear John Hammond is evading the law."

"Really?" said Alan, arching a brow.

Seeing his skepticism Morris was quick to launch into an explanation.

"I was first contacted by the Office of Technology Transfer. The OTT monitors shipments of American technology which might have military significance. They called to say that InGen had two areas of possible illegal technology transfer. First, InGen shipped three Cray XMPs to Costa Rica. InGen characterized it as transfer within corporate divisions, and said they weren't for resale. But OTT couldn't imagine why the hell somebody'd need that kind of power in Costa Rica."

"Three Crays," Alan said. "Is that some kind of computer?"

"Very powerful supercomputers. To put it in perspective, three Crays represent more computing power than any other privately held company in America. And InGen sent the machines to Costa Rica. You have to wonder why."

"I give up. Why?" Alan said.

"Nobody knows. And the Hoods are even more worrisome," Morris continued. "Hoods are automated gene sequencers—machines that work out the genetic code by themselves. They're so new that they haven't been put on the restricted lists yet. But any genetic engineering lab is likely to have one, if it can afford the half-million-dollar price tag and InGen shipped twenty-four Hood sequencers to their island in Costa Rica."

He shook his head, tapping his pen restlessly against his notepad.

"Again, they said it was a transfer within divisions and not an export. There wasn't much that OTT could do. They're not officially concerned with use. But InGen was obviously setting up one of the most powerful genetic engineering facilities in the world in an obscure Central American country. A country with no regulations. That kind of thing has happened before. You'll have heard of Lewis Dodgeson and the Biosyn case in '86."

"The company tested an obscure vaccine on a population of uninformed workers, in Mexico, right?"

"Right. Biosyn, moved the bulk of its operation onto foreign soil where they wouldn't be hampered by the regulations. We've been concerned that InGen is going to be more of the same so we began an official investigation," Morris said. "We started about three weeks ago."

"And what have you actually found?" asked Alan.

"Not much," Morris admitted. "When I go back to San Francisco, we'll probably have to close the investigation. And I think I'm about finished here. But I'll be damned if there isn't something going on."

He started packing up his briefcase.

"By the way," he added, glancing up, "What does 'juvenile hyperspace' mean?"

"That's just a fancy label for my report. 'Hyperspace' is a term for multidimensional space—like three-dimensional tic-tac-toe. I you were to take all the behaviors of an animal, its eating and movement and sleeping habits, you could plot the animal within the multidimensional space. Some paleontologists refer to the behavior of an animal as occurring in an ecological hyperspace. 'Juvenile hyperspace' would just refer to the behavior of juvenile dinosaurs—if you wanted to be as pretentious as possible."

At the far end of the trailer, the phone rang. Ellie answered it.

"Look I told you, he's in a meeting right now. He'll call you back. Yes. Yes, right away, I promise. Yes, thank you."

Morris snapped his briefcase shut and stood. "Thanks for your help and the beer," he said.

"No problem," Alan said.

Alan walked with Morris down the trailer to the door at the far end.

Morris paused there, with the door open, his eyes fixed on the small pile of reject bones going to the genetics lab in Utah.

"Did Hammond ever ask for any physical materials from your site? Bones, or eggs, or anything like that?"

"No," Alan said, "And we wouldn't have given it to him even if he did ask, not without properly processing it first."

"Dr. Sattler mentioned you do some genetic work here?"

"Not exactly," Alan said. "When we remove fossils that are broken or for some other reason not suitable for museum preservation, we send the bones out to a lab that grinds them up and tries to extract proteins for us, The proteins are then identified and the report is sent back to us."

"Which lab is that?" Morris asked.

"Medical Biologic Services in Salt Lake."

"How'd you choose them?"

"Competitive bids."

"The lab has nothing to do with InGen?" Morris asked.

"Not that I know of," Alan said.

"Damn. Alright then."

Morris took a breath and fished his sunglasses out of his jacket pocket sliding them on to his face.

"One last thing. Suppose InGen wasn't really making a museum exhibit. Is there anything else they could have done with the information in the report you gave them?"

Alan laughed, "Sure. They could feed a baby hadrosaur."

Morris laughed, too, shaking his head. "A baby hadrosaur. That'd be something to see. How big were they?"

"About so," Alan said, holding his hands six inches apart. "Squirrel sized."

"And how long before they become full-grown?"

"Three years," Grant said. "Give or take."

Morris held out his band. "Well, thanks again for your help."

"Take it easy driving back," Alan said.

He watched for a moment as Morris walked back toward his car, and then closed the trailer door.

"Well," he asked, turning to Ellie, "What did you think?"

Ellie shrugged. "Naive."

"Crazy," suggested Harry.

Alan laughed at that.

"You like the part where John Hammond is the evil arch-villain?" he snorted, "John Hammond's about as sinister as Walt Disney. By the way, who keeps calling?"

"A woman named Alice Levin. She works at Columbia Medical Center. You know her?"

"No. What did she want?"

"Well, it was something about identifying some remains. She wants you to call her back right away in case you didn't notice. That last call makes three in the past two hours."

"Mm. Better get back to her now then."

"Then you should eat your damn sandwich, beer doesn't count as lunch and I know you Alan."

Alan waved her off and hit redial on the trailer phone while Harry and Ellie exchanged a long-suffering glance.

Ellie shook her head and brushed a strand of blond hair back from her face, turning her attention back to the acid baths. She had six in a row and had to keep an eye on the stronger solutions because they would eat through the limestone and begin to erode the bones if she wasn't careful.

Harry leaned back into the couch and contemplated fetching a bottle of water from the fridge, eavesdropping shamelessly on Alan's phone call.

"Miss Levin? This is Alan Grant. What's this about a…You have what? A what?"

He began to laugh.

"Oh, I doubt that very much, Miss Levin…No, I really don't have time, I'm sorry…Well, I'd take a look at it, but I can pretty much guarantee it's a basilisk lizard. But—yes, you can do that. All right. Send it now."

Alan hung up, and shook his head.

"These people."

"What's it about?" asked Ellie not looking up from her work.

"Some lizard she's trying to identify," Alan said. "She's going to fax me an X-ray."

He walked over to the fax and waited as the transmission came through.

"Speaking of, I've got a new find for you. A good one."

"Yeah?"

"Hell yeah. Found it just before the kid showed up. On South Hill, horizon four. Infant velociraptor, jaw and complete dentition, so there's no question about identity. And the site looks undisturbed. We might even get a full skeleton."

"So it is a velociraptor? You're sure?" asked Harry excitedly.

"Yep, Darren will have kittens when he gets a good look at it. They'll probably be about done with the Thumper by now. God, I want to get back out there."

"That's fantastic," Ellie said, "How young?"

"Young. Two, maybe four months at most."

"And it's definitely a velociraptor?"

"Definitely," Grant said. "Maybe our luck has finally turned."

Harry knew that Alan, like Darren, was dying to study the nesting and young-rearing habits of carnivores, but despite the large prey population of hadrosaurs and years of searching they hadn't overturned a single carnivore nest.

"You must be pretty excited," Ellie said.

Alan didn't answer.

"Earth to Alan, hello? I said, you must be pretty excited," Ellie repeated.

"My God," Alan said.

He was staring at the fax.

Ellie moved to look over Grant's shoulder at the X-ray, and her eyes went wide as she sucked in a gasp. She breathed out slowly.

"You think it's an amassicus?"

"Yes," Grant said. "Or a triassicus. The skeleton is so light."

"But it's no lizard," she said.

"No," Grant said. "This is not a lizard. No three-toed lizard has walked on this planet for two hundred million years."

Harry hopped up and dashed over to see the fax. It was an X-ray of a small bipedal lizard and Harry even recognized what the skeleton would be.

"It's a Procompsognathus, right?" he piped up.

"It certainly looks like one," Alan agreed.

"But it has to be a hoax, right? Could this X-ray be faked?"

"I don't know," Alan said. "But it's almost impossible to fake an X-ray. And Procompsognathus is an obscure animal. Even people familiar with dinosaurs have never heard of it."

Ellie read the accompanying note aloud.

"Specimen acquired on the beach of Cabo Blanco, July 16. Apparently a howler monkey was eating the animal, and this was all that was recovered. It says the lizard attacked a little girl."

"I doubt that," Alan said. "But perhaps. Procompsognathus was so small and light we assume it must be a scavenger, only feeding off dead creatures. And you can tell the size, it's about twenty centimeters to the hips, which means the full animal would be about a foot tall. About as big as a chicken. Even a child would look pretty fearsome to it. It might bite an infant, but probably not a child."

Ellie frowned at the X-ray image.

"You think this could really be a legitimate rediscovery?" she said. "Like the coelacanth?"

"Maybe," Alan said.

"But could it be real?" she persisted. "What about the age?"

Alan made a considering noise in the back of his throat.

"The age is a problem. Procompsognathus flourished in the early Triassic, the world didn't even look the same. This isn't the vast tract of tropical and sub-tropical forests littered with ferns. The air would have been denser, the land warmer, volcanic activity would have—"

"We know animals have survived though. Crocodiles are basically Triassic animals living in the present. Sharks are Triassic too. So we know it has happened before."

Alan nodded.

"And the thing is," he said, "how else do we explain it? It's either a fake—which I doubt—or else it's a rediscovery. What else could it be?"

"Convergent evolution," suggested Harry.

Alan tugged on his ponytail but smiled.

"Doubtful, but there is that thought."

The phone rang.

"That'll be Alice Levin again," Alan said. "Let's see if she'll send us the actual specimen. If it is Procompsognathus I want my hands on that skeleton, yesterday."

He answered it, "Miss. Levin—Oh, sorry. Yes. Yes, that's me," he said into the receiver and looked over at Ellie, surprised.

"Yes, I'll hold for Mr. Hammond. Yes. Of course."

"Hammond? What does he want?" Ellie mouthed.

Alan shook his head, and then said into the phone, "Yes, Mr. Hammond. Yes, it's good to hear your voice, too. Yes." He looked at Ellie. "Oh, you did? Oh yes? Is that right?"

He cupped his hand over the mouthpiece and said, "Still as eccentric as ever. You've got to hear this."

Alan pushed the speaker button, and Ellie heard a raspy old-man's voice speaking rapidly: "—hell of an annoyance from some EPA fellow, seems to have gone off half-cocked, all on his own, running around the country talking to people, stirring up things. I don't suppose anybody's come to see you way out there?"

"As a matter of fact," Alan said, "somebody did come to see me."

Hammond snorted.

"I was afraid of that. Smart-ass kid named Morris?"

"Yes, his name was Morris," Alan said.

"He's going to see all our consultants," Hammond said. "He went to see Ian Malcolm the other day-you know, the mathematician in Texas? That's the first I knew of it. We're having one hell of a time getting a handle on this thing, it's typical of the way government operates, there isn't any complaint, there isn't any charge, just harassment from some kid who's unsupervised and is running around at the taxpayers' expense. Did he bother you? Disrupt your work?"

"No, no, he didn't bother me."

"Well, that's too bad, in a way," Hammond said, "because I'd try and get an injunction to stop him if he had. As it is, I had our lawyers call over at EPA to find out what the hell their problem is. The head of the office claims he didn't know there was any investigation! You figure that one out. Damned bureaucracy is all it is. Hell, I think this kid's trying to get down to Costa Rica, poke around, get onto our island. You know we have an island down there?"

"No," Alan said, looking at Ellie, "I didn't know."

"Oh yes, we bought it and started our operation oh, four or five years ago now. I forget exactly. Called Isla Nublar-big island, hundred miles offshore. Going to be a biological preserve. Wonderful place. Tropical jungle. You know, you ought to see it, Dr. Grant."

"Sounds interesting," Alan said, "but actually—"

"It's almost finished now, you know," Hammond said. "I've sent you some material about it. Did you get my material?"

"No, but we're pretty far from—"

"Maybe it'll come today. Look it over. The island's just beautiful. It's got everything. We've been in construction now thirty months. You can imagine. Big park. Opens in September next year. You really ought to go see it.

"It sounds wonderful, but—"

"As a matter of fact," Hammond said, and Harry could almost imagine the way the old man's face must have lit up just from the tone of his voice, "I'm going to insist you see it, Dr. Grant. I know it's right up your alley. You'd find it fascinating."

"I've no doubt. It's just that the timing is bad. I'm in the middle of—" Alan started only to be cut off again.

He let out a huff of annoyance as Hammond continued to speak over him.

"Say, I'll tell you what," Hammond said, as if the idea had just occurred to him. "I'm having some of the people who consulted for us go down there this weekend. Spend a few days and look it over. At our expense, of course. It'd be terrific if you'd give us your opinion."

"I couldn't possibly," Alan said firmly.

"Oh, just for a weekend," Hammond said, with the irritating, cheery persistence of an old man. "That's all I'm talking about, Dr. Grant. I wouldn't want to interrupt your work. I know how important that work is. Believe me, I know that. Never interrupt your work. But you could hop on down there this weekend, and be back on Monday."

"No, I couldn't," Alan said. "I've just found a new skeleton and—"

"Yes, fine, but I still think you should come—" Hammond said, not really listening.

This time Alan was the one to plough over Hammond.

"And we've just received some evidence for a very puzzling and remarkable find, which seems to be a living procompsognathid."

"A what?" Hammond said, slowing down. "I didn't quite get that. You said a living procompsognathid?"

"That's right," Alan said with no small amount of relief, even Hammond couldn't deny that such a find would have to take precedence over consulting work. "It's a biological specimen, a partial fragment of an animal collected from Central America. A living animal."

"You don't say," Hammond said. "A living animal? How extraordinary."

"Yes," Grant said. "We think so, too. So, you see, this isn't the time for me to be leaving—"

"Central America, did you say?"

"Yes."

"Where in Central America is it from, do you know?"

"A beach called Cabo Blanco, I don't know exactly where—"

"I see." Hammond cleared his throat, "And when did this, ah, specimen arrive in your hands?"

"Just today."

"Today, I see. Today. I see. Yes."

Hammond cleared his throat again.

Grant looked at Ellie and mouthed, "What's going on?"

Ellie shrugged. "He sounds upset." She mouthed back.

Alan put his hand on the mouthpiece and hissed, "Harry, see if Morris is still here."

Harry went to the window and looked out, but Morris's car was gone. Alan was giving him a questioning look but he shook his head and Alan made a face.

On the speaker, Hammond coughed.

"Ah, Dr. Grant. Have you told anybody about it yet?"

"No."

"Good, that's good. Well. Yes. I'll tell you frankly, Dr. Grant, I'm having a little problem about this island. This EPA thing is coming at just the wrong time."

"How's that?" Alan said.

"Well, we've had our problems and some delays. Let's just say that I'm under a little pressure here, and I'd like you to look at this island for me. Give me your opinion. I'll be paying you the usual weekend consultant rate of twenty thousand a day. That'd be sixty thousand for three days. And if you can spare Dr. Sattler, she'll go at the same rate. We need a botanist. What do you say?"

Ellie looked at Alan as he said, "Well, Mr. Hammond, that much money would fully finance our expeditions for the next two summers at least. I'm sure Ellie would love to come, I would too of course but with everything going on, and of course there's Harry."

"Harry?"

"My foster son," Alan elaborated, "I really can't just pick up and leave—"

"Foster son, good gracious, I had no idea you were a family man Dr. Grant. But your son, how old is he?"

"Harry just turned eleven last week."

"Well then that's perfect," Hammond declared, "This park is meant for kids, you should bring him along. Yes, most definitely."

Ellie was giving him a look, and Harry was mouthing say yes exaggeratedly, so he threw his hands in the air even as he said: "In that case Mr. Hammond I'm sure Ellie and I will both be seeing you shortly."

"Good, good," Hammond said blandly.

He seemed distracted now, his thoughts elsewhere.

"I want this to be easy. Now, I'm sending the corporate jet to pick you up at that private airfield east of Choteau. You know the one I mean? It's only about two hours' drive from where you are. You're to be there at five p.m. tomorrow and I'll be waiting for you. Take you right down. Can you and Dr. Sattler make that plane?"

"I guess we can."

"Good. Pack lightly. You don't need passports. I'm looking forward to it. See you tomorrow," Hammond said, and he hung up.

Alan was left holding the receiver and gaping slightly at the phone. Slowly he set it down in its cradle.

"Well, I guess that's that then."

A pounding on the trailer door startled them and the three of them nearly jumped out of their skins.

"Dr. Grant, Thumper's all set, we've been having some problems with the equipment again but Quinn's ready to try when you are," said Darren wiggling the trailer door open and poking his dusty head in without ceremony.

"We'll be right there," Alan said lowering himself into his desk chair. "It's not even two o'clock and already I'm exhausted. I must be getting old."

"Eat your sandwich before you head out there," Ellie said grabbing the, now slightly squished looking, package from the coffee table and dropping it into his lap.

"Yeah, alright."

* * *

**AN: **Okay, so this is meant to be a Harry Potter crossover with a fusion of elements from both the Jurassic Park books and movies, so if you're only familiar with one or the other you might see things that are different, don't worry about it I'm just mucking around with canonical events so that they suit my purposes.

It's actually fairly easy because the JP and HP timelines coincide beautifully. The plan is for this to be an AU epic spanning the whole of the JP and HP verses with characters from both sides coming in, but for now I'm starting out with small changes. So if people want to give suggestions about changes they'd like to see I'm all ears.

Please review, as I love to hear from you guys, the good and the bad, but more importantly please subscribe to story alert so you can enjoy the evolution of this story!


	2. Chapter 2

**Bones**

**Chapter Two: Moving Forward and Looking Back**

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Harry Potter or Jurassic Park in any of its forms.

* * *

As it turned out, the computer problems, ones tricky enough to set Quinn to cursing up a blue streak in a mix of English and Korean, delayed the excavation of the baby velociraptor until the next day.

The problem was that once you started uncovering a skeleton you either had to keep going or there was a serious risk of losing it to erosion, people thought of it as a slow process, if they even though of it at all, but the truth was that the shifting of the sand and gravel could easily damage or rebury a delicate fossil and then there was always the threat of a sudden rainstorm rolling in and washing the bones away. Alan wasn't about to take any risks that the skeleton would be damaged or lost before he got back from his incredibly inconvenient jaunt to Costa Rica. The problem with setting up the standard field protection of a tarp and trenches was that they had no idea how large the skeleton was going to be uncovered, and they didn't know if there were other fossils in the ground nearby that might be damaged while digging the trenches. That was where Quinn and the Thumper came in with their fancy computer assisted sonic tomography.

The Thumper fired a soft lead slug into the ground and the computer translated the shockwaves into a sort of X-ray of the hillside. When the equipment worked, which to Quinn's credit was about sixty percent of the time, it made things a whole hell of a lot easier but the results were decidedly varied. Equipment that had worked flawlessly in lab settings had proven to be incredibly finicky in the field and occasionally Harry had seen Quinn literally tearing his hair out in frustration.

Today was one such occasion.

Darren had helped Quinn get set up with his portable computer on the top of hill four, where Alan and Harry had been digging. The battery-powered menace was perched on top of an empty beer crate not far from the Thumper itself and Quinn was fiddling with cables and mechanical antennae, his expression set with fierce determination even as muttered invectives spilled from his lips.

The last attempt had been nearly successful and Alan, Ellie and Harry were taking a quick break while Quinn fiddled and fussed. The kids, Harry included, had managed to further uncover the cranium, revealing the signature anteorbital fenestrae but were reluctant to excavate any further until they could do the whole thing properly, under the careful eyes of Alan and Ellie.

"Joe brought this back from town," Ellie said, tossing Alan a thick manila envelope printed with a blue and white crest, "It's from Hammond."

"InGen, hmm."

Alan tore open the envelope, and pulled out the bound stack of paper.

"What the hell is all this?"

There was no cover letter but inside the front pages there was a short note from Hammond explaining that the book was about the Isla Nublar project.

"I don't get it," Alan muttered flipping through the book, "These are architectural plans, I'm not an architect what does Hammond think I'm going to be able to do with these?"

"Read them would be my guess," said Ellie peering over his shoulder at the plans with interest, "It looks like a resort, all right. Swimming pools, tennis courts, ornamental gardens, visitor's centre, safari lodge, gift shop."

"Yeah, it's all very dramatic and showy in the visitors centre but the rest of the island is practically bare, you have these roads, smaller maintenance paths, and outbuildings and then the island is sectioned off with big curving stretches of electrical fences," Alan pointed out.

"Electrified fences at a resort?" said Ellie arching a brow.

"Miles of them," said Alan, "With moats, and usually they follow the maintenance roads."

"So like a zoo. Hammond did say this was meant to be a biological preserve right? There are probably large animals. He'd want to ensure the safety of the guests."

"Still, there's such a thing as going overboard, look at this here Ellie, the roads are raised above the fence line so you can see which is reasonable and then along some of the enclosures you have moats that are thirty feet wide and made of steel reinforced concrete. It's like a military fortification."

Alan and Ellie exchanged a bewildered glance.

Just then the other undergrad student, Thom, came running up.

"Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, they're ready to try again," he said.

"Back to work," said Alan putting on his hat and leaving the book of plans on the folding table under the trailer's awning.

Harry and Ellie were quick to follow him out into the sun.

"I hate computers," he sighed, taking long-legged strides up the hill.

"Yeah, well, the feeling's mutual," Ellie teased.

They reached the crest of the hill and Darren bellowed: "Fire!"

The milling students all flinched a bit at the loud explosion but they had started to get used to them over the course of the summer.

"How long will it take before we get the image?" asked Ellie coming up next to Quinn.

"We should be getting nearly immediate return. Fire the probe and the bone bounces the image back."

He flicked on the monitor so that the gathering crowd could see.

"Bounces it back," he pleaded when the screen remained blank for a long minute.

Then suddenly yellow contour lines traced their way across the screen. The resolution was nearly perfect this time.

"Alright, here we go," cheered Quinn, tapping away on his keypad, "This new program they sent me is amazing, a few more years of development and I could tell you everything about what's under this hill without even having to look sideways at a shovel."

"Now where's the fun in that," said Alan, leaning over his shoulder to get a better look at the picture.

Quinn pulled a face.

"The image is a little distorted but I don't think it's the computer," he commented, enlarging the picture a bit so it filled the entire screen, "There's your skeleton. Praise me for I am god of all nerds."

"Don't get cocky kid," commented Alan.

"Look," said Ellie, "The arch of the neck vertebrae, that'll be from post-mortem contraction of the posterior neck ligaments."

"Mm," Alan agreed, "She's got a good shape too. Five, maybe six feet tall, nine feet long, and look at the extraordinary—"

Alan moved forward a bit to point out the salient bit of anatomy to Ellie and his fingertips brushed the screen and it went black.

"What did you do?" demanded Quinn immediately, incensed, "What did he do?"

"He touched it," laughed Harry.

"Dr. Grant isn't really machine-compatible," Ellie said, chuckling.

"They've got it in for me," Alan admitted wryly.

"Back demon," said Quinn, forking a crude version of the evil eye at Alan, who raised a bemused brow, "I've lost the integrator input."

While Quinn bent to fiddle with his tangle of wires again Alan sighed and said to Ellie, "Looks like we're doing this the old-fashioned way," eliciting a series of groans from the rest of the students on the hilltop.

"Come on guys, let's go, I want this skeleton properly covered before I have to leave."

"Wait!" cried Quinn triumphantly, his head popping back up, "Wait, I've got it! I've got the image back here we go."

The monitor flickered and the color was a bit off, the yellowy tint faded more to green, but there was the near perfect image of the raptor infant. The students cheered and Alan couldn't help but smile and ruffled Quinn's hair familiarly.

"Good job, kid."

"Touch it and die," sighed Quinn happily, grinning from ear to ear as he slumped into his folding chair and accepted a congratulatory pat on the back from Darren and Joe.

"Look here Ellie, at the half-moon shaped bones in the wrists, it's a wonder this beauty didn't learn how to fly," he said, enraptured by the image.

The roused a chuckle from the students, and Alan turned and huffed at the group, "What? I'm serious. Look at this image and think about what you've seen of skeletons, think about the anatomical similarities. Maybe dinosaurs, raptors in particular, have more in common with modern day bird than they do with reptiles. The pubic bone, it's turned backward, just like a bird. The vertebrae are another example. They're filled with air sacs and hollows just like a bird. Even the word itself, raptor, means bird of prey."

"It's not very scary," commented Geordie, who was standing in the crowd, "It's not big, like T-rex, more like a six foot turkey."

Harry glared at the other boy, the whining tone of his voice setting Harry's teeth on edge.

"Shows what you know," Harry retorted, "T-rex might have been big but velociraptor was vicious. They were pack hunters, they could set traps, coordinate attacks. They were smarter than T-rex."

"You tell him Harry," goaded Darren.

Harry glanced back at Alan and Ellie but they both seemed amused to see him squaring off against Geordie so he continued his voice dropping into a mimicry of Alan's lecturing tone.

"Imagine we tossed you back in time into the cretaceous period," he started, "And you walk into a clearing and get a good look at this so-called six foot turkey. He moves without making a sound, lightly, his head bobs like a bird, and at first you aren't scared but then he looks at you and you freeze. You stare at him and he stares right back at you."

Geordie, who up until this point had been blatantly disrespectful and contemptuous with his weight shifting, pointed sighing and eye rolling, stiffened suddenly paying more attention and Harry locked eyes with him. He knew how unsettling the full force of his stare could be and he widened his eyes a bit to use it to its full effect.

"You keep still not daring to even breath, hoping that he won't see you if you don't move. That's when the attack comes, not from the front but from the sides, and the two raptors you didn't even know were there."

Geordie drew in a shaky breath and Harry knew he'd made his point but he kept pushing.

"And they slash at you with that," he said pointing at the monitor.

Helpfully Alan took the fossilized raptor claw out of his back pocket and held it up in anatomically correct position on his own hand. Ellie smacked his arm in protest, but Alan was happily ignoring her. Harry figured he was just as annoyed with Geordie. Bethie looked amused but her husband was scowling.

"It's like a huge, serrated razor, on the middle toe. They don't bother to bite you, or tear you apart into smaller pieces. There's no need, they'll slash at your soft bits, the belly or groin, open you up to get at the good bits and you'll still be alive when they start to eat you. So, show a little respect, 'kay?"

"Okay," agreed Geordie with a frantic nod, scrambling over to his parents.

Spell broken some of the other students chuckled but people started dispersing back to their jobs. Ellie swatted both him and Alan upside the head.

"Jesus, you two," she scolded, even as her lips twitched, no one liked having their life's work insulted directly or indirectly after all, "If you wanted to scare the kid you could have pulled a gun on him."

"He deserved it," Harry protested, "He was being a prat."

"Prat," said Ellie arching a brow, "Very British of you. You know the reason you don't make friends with the kids in your classes is because you alternately ignore them, upstage them, terrify them, and insult them in ways they don't understand, right?"

"I don't need friends my own age, I have other friends. Smarter friends."

"You can't hang around grad students all the time, it's not good for the development of your social skills as we can plainly see. Alan, help me out here," sighed Ellie.

"Don't look at me, I agree with him," said Alan, "Kids. And you want one of those?"

"Not that one, no, but a breed of child Dr. Grant could be intriguing if Harry is any indication."

Alan snorted but tugged on Harry's ponytail fondly, "Can you imagine if actual genetics were involved?"

"Yeah, I kinda can."

"Alright Brady Bunch, break it up," interjected Darren, "This is now a feel-good-family-moment free zone, we've got work to do, before something else goes wrong with the computer and Quinn throws himself off the side of the hill and breaks his neck."

"Come on, Ellie, Darren is, for once in his life, right. We've got a plane to catch. Harry, go help Bethie with the tarp and while you're at it apologize for scaring Geordie."

Harry did as instructed, and received a shrug and a nudge from Bethie who told him that not everyone could love dusty old bones as much as them and that he needed to be more tolerant. Then she laughed and said that he should be a professor at the university when he got a bit taller, whip the whiny little freshman in the first year courses into shape.

Behind them Alan started bellowing instructions for the two metre square trench that was to go around the skeleton, marking off the distances in paces while the other grad students struggled to get their shovels to move the required amounts of alternately sandy and rocky earth.

Ellie came by with the extra mallet and helped them pound in the final stakes, making sure the tarp was properly pinned down.

"Alright, that's it, Darren and Bethie can supervise the trench digging and deal with the acid baths while we're gone, but we've gotta go now if we're gonna make the flight a Choteau," Ellie said, glancing down at her watch and then standing.

"Right," said Alan, "Darren, you good here?"

"Sure thing Dr. Grant, we'll have fun slacking off while you con the city-slickers out of more money."

"Just remember you're buying the beer for the rest of August if we run out."

The students waved them off as they changed into slightly less dusty, and even nominally clean, clothes and piled into Ellie's old jeep. Alan spent most of the two hour drive commenting on the odder points of the Isla Nublar project outlined by Hammond's information packet while Harry read a book off his summer reading list that had been rotting in Ellie's backseat since June.

When they got to Choteau they were ushered past airport security with minimal hassle and ended up standing on the cracked tarmac watching the wind kick up eddies of dust and shifting from foot to foot wishing for some shade.

"I hate waiting on the money men," sighed Alan, adjusting his hat.

"It goes with the job," shrugged Ellie, philosophically.

"Mm. Doesn't mean I have to like it."

"How long is it to Costa Rica from here?" asked Harry curiously, watching the sleek little jet circle the airport a couple of times before coming in for a landing.

"To damn long," Alan answered, "If we're lucky we'll be allowed to sleep through most of it."

Ellie hefted her bag up onto her shoulder as the little plane rolled to a stop not too far from them and an exhausted stewardess in a navy blue uniform descended a small flight of stairs to greet them with a smile that spoke of thousands of dollars invested in orthodontics and regular whitening treatments.

For all that it was a luxuriously appointed private jet, it was still a fairly small aircraft, Alan had to bend over when they moved into the plane and shook hands with Hammond.

John Hammond was a short, vivacious man in his early seventies with a fluffy white beard that reminded Harry of the stuffed Santa Claus dolls that populated the storefronts in Denver come Christmas time. He was dressed in airy white linen and sported an airy white smile.

"Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, how good of you both to agree to join us at such short notice and this young lad must be Harry. Strapping young fellow, Dr. Grant you must be so proud, yes."

Sitting next to him was a weedy-looking, mousy-haired man dressed in an Armani suit and carrying a briefcase. Harry pegged him for a lawyer without needing a second glance and exchanged a look with Alan.

"Allow me to introduce my associate Donald Gennaro, he's a particular pebble in my shoe, represents my investors, I shall be relying on the three of you to defend me. Donald these are the dinosaur experts you were so insistent on having, and their son. A sample of our target audience."

"You're a woman," said Gennaro, when Ellie leaned over to shake his hand.

"These things happen," said Ellie gripping his hand with excessive force and smiling sweetly.

Alan and Harry exchanged another look, glad that for once Ellie would be firmly on their side.

"Take your seats please, and fasten your seatbelts ladies and gentlemen, the plane will be taking off shortly," interrupted the stewardess.

"You'll have to excuse the rush," Hammond said over the whirr of the engines, "Donald was very insistent that we get right down there."

Gratefully Alan, Ellie and Harry, sank into the plush and excessively ergonomic seats behind Gennaro and Hammond. The stewardess closed the door and the plane began to move even as she ran through the quick spiel about the emergency exits, oxygen masks, and parachutes.

Once they were in the air the pilot informed them that it would be a four hour flight to Dallas where they would stop to refuel and that they would reach Costa Rica early the next morning. Hammond went on to explain that they couldn't get a jet out to the island because of the wind shears and that they'd take the company helicopter from the airport in San Jose over to Isla Nublar.

"How long are we going to be in Costa Rica?" asked Alan, a bit anxiously.

"That depends," said Gennaro with a tight-lipped frown that put Harry in mind of his Aunt Petunia, "We have a lot of issues to clear up."

"You can take my word for it Dr. Grant," said Hammond insistently, "We won't be down there for more than forty-eight hours."

Alan buckled his seatbelt and frowned thoughtfully at the InGen logo etched into the buckle.

"Mr. Hammond, this island of yours—I haven't heard anything about it before. Is it some kind of secret?"

"In a way," answered Hammond, "We've had to be very, very careful about making sure nobody knows about it until opening day. I want it to surprise and delight the planet, and on a project of this scale, well, of course the utmost secrecy has to be employed."

Harry spent a few minutes staring out into the empty sky before following Alan's advice and example and falling soundly asleep while Hammond was distracted making phone calls.

They were both roused by Ellie at around midnight when they landed in Dallas and picked up another passenger.

Ian Malcolm was a tall, thin man in his early thirties with a thick crop of curling black hair that went very nicely with the rest of his ensemble. Black boots, black socks, black jeans, a black shirt, black leather jacket and a pair of black sunglasses tucked into his front pocket.

"Ah, Dr. Malcolm, welcome aboard," said Hammond with a somewhat forced smile as Malcolm made his way to his seat.

"Hello John," grinned Malcolm, not at all offended by his lack of obvious welcome, "Yes, I'm afraid your old nemesis is here."

He shook hands with everyone in the room, even Harry, without being prompted, introducing himself with a casual: "I'm Ian Malcolm. I do math."

He seemed to think that the whole endeavor was funny, and was laughing at all of them with his eyes, which were so dark a brown they might as well have been black.

When the stewardess asked him if she could get him anything to drink he ordered a diet coke: "Shaken not stirred, darling, thank you."

"You'll have to forgive Dr. Malcolm, he suffers from a deplorable excess of personality," said Hammond, "Particularly for a mathematician."

"Chaotician, actually." Malcolm was quick to correct, "But John here doesn't subscribe to chaos, and particularly what the theory has to say about his little island project."

"Codswallop. You've never been able to fully explain or justify your concerns, Ian, and it seems to me like a load of fashionable number crunching."

"Come on John, you know you have a serious problem on your hands," said Malcolm with a smile, garnering a number of interested looks.

"There is no problem," Hammond was quick to assert.

"I always maintained that the island would be unworkable, given the system's behavior in phase space. I predicted it from the beginning. I brought a copy of my original report for you to reread specifically so that I could rub your nose in it."

He handed out a few copies to the others.

"The math gets a little sticky in places but I can talk you through it, and at least it'll give us something to do."

The plane flew through the night, but no one got desparate enough for entertainment to actually do more than skim through Malcolm's report except Gennaro who was on his third read-through of the thing and had a legal pad full of notes by the time they disembarked the plane at the airport in San Jose and caught the InGen helicopter.

The helicopter was an eight-seater, and Harry ended up crammed up against the window across from Malcolm. They'd also picked up a grubby, fat man who reeked of artificial sugars and declared himself there to deal with the computer glitches but didn't offer to shake anyone's hand.

"So your paper says that Mr. Hammond's island is going to fail because of Chaos Theory, but what is Chaos Theory exactly?" asked Harry when they were about thirty minutes into the flight and conversation had petered out.

Malcolm eyed him with interest.

"Well, the math is probably above your head but have you heard of non-linear equations?"

"Like, equations that don't make lines? Or equations that aren't in lines?"

Malcolm laughed, "Both and neither, what about strange attractors?"

Harry shot the man his best withering look.

"Alright, alright. I'll explain. Physics has had a good amount of success describing certain kinds of behavior, movement of objects mostly, but also fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Physicists became very sure that they could apply math to every system on the planet, no matter how complex, and use it to describe that system's behavior. The thing is those movements are described by linear equations, they have a rhythm to them, a regularity, we've been solving them for hundred of years and have some idea about what to expect. However, there are certain systems, certain types of movement, that physics handles very badly. These types of movement need to be described with nonlinear equations. Turbulence is a good example. Weather is another. You could say that the attempt to use computer models in order to predict the weather was the true start of Chaos Theory."

"Okay, but what does that have to do with anything," prodded Harry since it seemed Malcolm was going off on a tangent.

"Keep your shirt on grasshopper, I'm getting there."

"Now, early researchers learned that even using computer model the weather was impossible to predict, not that meteorologists ever got that memo. The problem was that weather, as a system, the way the earth interacts with the sun and atmosphere, is incredibly dependent on initial conditions. You with me so far?"

"Er…so the idea is that unless you know exactly what the starting conditions were you couldn't predict the weather?"

"You couldn't predict it even if you did know the starting conditions, because there are tiny variations, no two sets of conditions will ever be precisely the same, and thus will never produce the same end result. Fundamentally unpredictable."

"Okay," agreed Harry.

"But, there is an underlying order to chaotic systems just as there is an underlying complexity to linear systems."

"Nope, you lost me again."

"Linear physics says that we can track an object's movement, predict it based on initial conditions, discover where it will be say three hours from now, but if you try to do it you will never get a result that matches up with your math after more than a few minutes." Harry opened his mouth to say something, but Malcolm held up a hand to forestall the question, "What I'm saying is It doesn't matter what you're trying to predict, or how good your math is, you can't say with any certainty what will happen in the future beyond a few minutes, except to say that simple systems will start to behave in complex unpredictable ways and complex systems will regulate themselves according to their underlying order, characterized by their movements within phase space."

"So, basically, you're saying that Mr. Hammond's island is doomed to failure because it doesn't matter what he's done or what he plans to do, his island will start to be unpredictable," said Harry.

"Yes," agreed Malcolm, looking pleased, "That's exactly it. And with John's project, well, even a non-chaotician can see it's an accident just waiting to happen."

"Is it bad that my eleven year old kid caught on to this faster than me," Alan asked Ellie in a stage whisper.

Ellie laughed, "I won't tell if you don't."

"Yes, well, as enlightening as I'm sure your explanation has been, Ian, we're almost in the park now, and I'd like it if my expert opinions could keep an open mind about the whole project," said Hammond.

Harry was quick to swivel in his seat, straining against the belt to get a good view of the spit of lush green that came suddenly into view out of the ocean below them.

"Now I mentioned before that we have bad wind shears, so we'll have to drop pretty fast and it can be a little jarring, so you'd best hold on," said Hammond.

Just then Harry felt that queer sensation that his stomach had been left behind as they dropped several feet without warning, startling Alan and Ellie out of their lounging position and sending Gennaro's papers flying everywhere.

"Yahoo," said Hammond unconcernedly.

The adults all gave into nervous laughter and quickly started clicking their seatbelts into place. Alan went to do the same but got his belt mixed up.

"Here, no this goes like this," Ellie instructed.

"No, no, it goes with that piece over there," Hammond said leaning over Ellie and pointing, "Look we'll have landed by the time you get it right."

Alan just shook his head and rather than bothering with the buckle tied the mismatched ends around each other.

The chopper touched down on a helipad with a large fluorescent cross as a marker, right at the base of a huge waterfall.

The whine of the rotors faded and then died completely and a man dressed in a polo shirt and pressed khaki trousers came running up to the door holding it open with the wide elaborate grin that plagued everyone in the customer service industry on his face.

"Hi," he said brightly as he helped them all out of the chopper, "I'm Ed Regis. Welcome to Isla Nublar everybody, and please watch your step."

* * *

**AN: **Thanks to everybody who took the time to review, alert and fave. I was happy to see such a positive response to the first chapter, especially when there isn't much action involved yet.

Hopefully this chapter also lives up to your expectations!

A further disclaimer, my research has lead me to conclude that I will NOT always be accurately representing dinosaurs in their form or behavior, so in other words don't believe everything you hear in this fic! I'll ask that you excuse me and please remember that Michael Crichton did write this book in 1990, I'll try and correct for biological facts consistent with current research when I can but some things (like the approximate size of velociraptor) have been retained in their incorrect forms for dramatic flair, which I'm sure you can all appreciate.

As always please review and let me know what you think!


	3. Chapter 3

**Bones**

**Chapter Three: First Impressions**

**Disclaimer:** I don't own Harry Potter or Jurassic Park

* * *

Ed Regis, who Hammond introduced as the head of public relations for the island, shook everyone's hand and gave Harry a more benevolent version of his elaborate smile and a pat on the shoulder as they were herded over to the grey and green jeeps parked on the gravel road at the base of the helipad.

Since no one really wanted to be in the same jeep as Gennaro and Regis, especially not with Hammond yammering on, Harry wedged himself between Alan and Malcolm in the back seat of one jeep while Ellie sat up front with her booted feet propped up on the dash. The man driving their car was dressed in a polo shirt, same as Regis, but wore steel toed work boots and industrial blue coveralls with the sleeves knotted around his waist. Clearly some people had been pulled out of their usual jobs, this guy probably from maintenance, in order to give them the honored guest treatment.

A few minutes down the road they came to the first of the electrified fences Alan and Ellie had noted on the schematics. Harry hadn't given them much thought but looking up at them, as they passed through a checkpoint and were waved through by the staff there, he realized that they stretched up a good twenty to twenty-five feet and the horizontally stretching metal cables were about as thick around as his forearm. The fence was camouflaged by the thick mists and abundant foliage all around them so it was hard to see for sure, but Harry thought he remembered Alan saying that most of the island was divided up into sections by these massive electric fences, fences that, according to the signs, had ten thousand volts of electricity running through them, and agreed that it was probably overkill. Nothing on the planet could possibly need that kind of security to keep it in.

They soon left the gravel track that spiraled down from the helipad and went bumping along on the dirt and grass instead taking the scenic route down the mountain.

Ellie was having the time of her life, reaching out to pluck specimens off their branches with impunity every time they slowed down.

"The primary ecology of the island is likely your more traditional tropical rainforest," she was saying to Malcolm, who'd asked about the leaves she was picking and now had a rather glazed look on his face, "But at the peaks of the mountains—you see the change in color, there and there—the changes in elevation and the abundant ambient moisture give rise to a deciduous rainforest microclimate and I've already spotted a number of instances of interesting hybridization."

"That's great Ellie," Alan interrupted, "But try not to get any of your important bits taken off leaning out of the jeep like that."

Ellie blatantly ignored him, going as far as to hook an ankle under her seat and lean out of the vehicle up to her waist to snag an interesting spade-shaped broadleaf.

The further down the mountain they went the warmer and wetter the air became. The early morning mists were just starting to be burned away by the rising sun as they drove out of a dense patch of vegetation and onto a savannah-esque landscape of rolling hills.

In front of them Hammond had Regis stop the jeep a few feet away and was hopping out, with some help from his cane, still rather nimble for a man of his age, and hurrying towards them.

Wondering why they'd stopped in what seemed pretty much like the absolute middle of nowhere, Harry craned his neck to the left and right and then finally backward and that's when he got his first glimpse of it.

At first glance it looked like a particularly tall, dead tree stump, nothing like the richly alive rainforest they'd been passing through and then it moved, not swaying in the breeze like Harry had first assumed but moving along the distant tree line and then out into the open plain.

A sudden recognition punched through his gut, and before he'd even realized what he was doing he'd kicked his backpack aside and was standing in the luggage compartment of the jeep with his mouth hanging open in shock and his hands trembling in excitement.

Next to him Alan had yanked off both his hat and sunglasses and dropped them onto the floor of the jeep and was standing on his seat, gawping just as unashamedly, because the figure that had emerged from the tree line was unmistakably an apatosaur, a brontosaurus.

Behind them Ellie was still muttering.

"This shouldn't be here," she said, tracing the edge of the leaf with the pad of her index finger, counting lobes, "Alan this species of _veriformans_ has been extinct since the cretaceous period. This thing is— what?"

Harry didn't need to turn, he could practically see the expression on Ellie's face as she let the leaf flutter out of her nerveless fingers, got to her feet and stared just as unashamedly as Alan and Harry were.

"You did it," breathed Malcolm, "John, you crazy sonofabitch, you actually did it."

Hammond came up alongside the jeep looking delighted by their responses.

"I thought you all might like to see what you're really here for before we get started on the technicalities," he was saying as the two paleontologists and Harry staggered out of the jeep for a closer look.

"It's a dinosaur," were the first coherent sounds out of Alan's mouth.

"My god," sighed Ellie, "My _god_."

Harry's first thought was that the brontosaurus was actually quite beautiful. The pictures in books always portrayed the sauropods as somewhat slow, dumpy creatures, but the brontosaurus in front of him carried itself with a kind of elegant dignity, its long neck arching in a clean line as it bent to nibble on a bit of greenery.

Then all at once another, slightly taller, head came into view and regarded them with big doe eyes trumpeting a call like an elephant. A call that was echoed by yet more grazing sauropods, heads rising above the trees like towers.

"They're moving in herds," said Alan.

"And so fast," added Ellie, "Look at the activity, this creature doesn't live in a swamp," she laughed.

"They're…very lifelike aren't they," said Malcolm, seemingly stunned out of his usual flair for the dramatic.

"Yes, they are, aren't they," agreed Hammond, all but bursting at the seams with pride, "And as well they should be."

"This proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no way that this creature is cold-blooded. The neck must be twenty, twenty-five feet long," observed Alan his brain working a mile a minute, accepting the creature in front of him and discarding potential theories left right and center as he observed the herd's movements.

"Yes," agreed Hammond, "And the brachiosaurs typically get necks as long as thirty feet."

"Thirty feet," he breathed, "How fast are they?"

"Well, the sauropods are speedy for their size, grant you, but, even more impressively, we've clocked the T-rex at thirty-two miles per hour on open ground," said Hammond.

"T-t-rex," stuttered Ellie, turning away from the dinosaurs to face Hammond, "You said, you've got a T-rex?"

"Yes," agreed Hammond looking quite pleased with himself.

"Say again?" demanded Harry.

"We have a T-rex."

Alan made a low noise halfway between a laugh and a groan and staggered a bit on his feet.

"Easy, easy," said Ellie, catching his shoulder, "Put your head between your knees."

Rather than listen to her Alan just let himself fall into the soft thick grass.

"Dr. Grant, Dr. Sattler, and Harry, my dear boy, welcome to Jurassic Park," said Hammond grandly.

The three of them stared out over the plain watching as two of the brontosauruses moved into the shallows of a smallish lake where a heard of about twenty duck-billed hadrosaurs were gathered seemingly unconcerned by the giant herbivores.

"How did you do all this?" asked Alan, his voice barely above a whisper.

"On your feet, my lad, and I'll show you."

They clambered back into the jeep with some reluctance craning their necks to keep the dinosaurs in view for as long as possible, but soon they were out of sight of the plain and passing once more through one of the denser patches of wet, thickly green forest.

Everywhere they turned there was extensive elaborate planting that emphasized the idea that this wasn't their world. This was a small slice of a bygone era, a prehistoric tropical rainforest filled with wondrous, majestic creatures.

Beyond the tunnel of green, and another set of electrified fences, was the visitor's center. It was huge and luxurious and elaborate in a way that the architectural design couldn't convey. The building itself was done in marbled whitewash over smooth concrete to help with the heat, which was beginning to border on oppressive even though it wasn't even noon yet, and beyond the thick fronds of Jurassic ferns was an organically structured swimming pool with several tiers that featured fountains and waterfalls. The poolside bar was still under construction, as were the tennis courts along the back section of the yard but as Harry stepped out of the vehicle and onto the mulch drive he could practically feel the top of the line luxury.

"Your rooms are the first suite on the third floor, so take a minute to drop off your bags and freshen up a bit and then you can meet me back in the reception area and I'll give you the grand tour of the facilities, after that I thought we'd break for a bit of lunch before we send you out into the park later on this afternoon. I'll then join you for dinner and answer whatever further questions and concerns you have after that," said Hammond leading them through an elaborate, but unfinished, reception area and over to a set of elevators.

The rooms upstairs were just as lavish as the rest of the compound with huge beds and airy bedding with artful drapes of lacy intricate mosquito netting. Each room had an ensuite bathroom with tubs and showers and a mini-bar and the television featured programs with cutesy names like Sauropod Swamp and Pterosaur Peak, though when Harry flicked through the channels all he got was static.

Harry took a moment to rinse off the sweat and humidity from the drive, brush his teeth with the complementary toothpaste and toothbrush, and take care of a few burning necessities that had been nagging at him since the helicopter had landed and then bounced into Alan's room where both Alan and Ellie were comparing the architectural plans they'd received to the rooms themselves.

"You notice the bars they installed on the skylights?" Alan was saying.

"Oh yeah," said Ellie, borrowing Alan's mirror to pull her hair up into a twist, "They definitely changed the original plans. The windows are a couple of inches smaller and the glass is tempered and set into a steel frame."

"The doors are steel-clad as well," Alan noted, "And they added an electrified fence around the whole visitor's complex."

"Do you think that that lawyer is right?" asked Harry, "That the park is dangerous?"

"Mmm," Alan considered the room at large running a hand through his brown hair, "I couldn't say, but I'm going to take a guess that Hammond has had a few incidents and that all this is meant to reassure Gennaro and the moneymen that he's got things under control. Whether things actually are under control of course is a different story."

"But then again I guess that's what we're here for," shrugged Ellie, "To consult and have them make the changes that will hopefully make things safe for everybody. The ferns they have around the pool for instance, they're incredibly poisonous. Poisonous enough to maybe kill a child if they took a big enough bite, but no one except a paleobotanist would know that."

"And that's just the tip of the iceberg," snorted Alan, "The truth is that even though we've been studying these things for years we're in over our heads. There's so little about dinosaurs we can actually say for certain and given that these ones were cloned somehow, they might look and act differently from the real-thing, so to speak."

Harry laughed a bit, "I bet if you asked Ian Malcolm he'd say that it was inevitable and he'd predicted it."

"Yeah, well, I don't know about Malcolm, but if I'd known exactly what was going on here I probably would have left you with Darren and Quinn," said Alan ruefully.

"Well, I'm not complaining then," said Harry loftily, waving off his concerns, "I wouldn't miss this for anything. I mean come on, Alan, real, or at least real-ish, dinosaurs!"

"Yeah," sighed Alan, ruffling his hair, "That's what worries me, kid."

"Well, we're here already so there's no sense worrying about it now," said Ellie, "Besides, it seems like as far as safety precautions for the guests are concerned Hammond isn't taking any chances. Let's just go downstairs and get on with the tour."

"Ellie's right," said Harry as they left the rooms, "You worry too much Alan, I can handle myself."

"I know you can, but that'll never keep me from worrying, it comes with the gig."

Harry grinned up at Alan and allowed the older man to sling an arm over his thin shoulders.

They didn't talk about the Dursleys really, so Alan didn't know about the specifics, but until he'd been sent to Colorado he'd never smiled. He couldn't make friends, he didn't trust anyone. At the age of seven he'd been almost entirely self-sufficient, as long as there was food in the fridge or cupboards he didn't need Alan to do anything for him at all. He could cook, clean, dress himself, wash himself, organize himself for school and get there on time all without any trouble or any of what Harry called 'adult meddling'.

It had taken years of working away at that shell of self-sufficiency to get Harry to let him treat him like anything other than a very short house-guest, and he'd come to treasure him. As far as Alan Grant was concerned Harry was his kid, and with that feeling came the urge to protect him. Even, and probably especially, when he maybe didn't need protecting.

Lost in their thoughts Alan and Harry both were a little startled when they found that they'd followed Ellie and the others out of the visitor's center and into the reception area for the main operations building. In contrast to the luxurious feel of the visitor's center the main building was done in a very modern style, all sleek granite, steel girders and more tempered glass, it was cool and elegant and immediately gave off the impression of expertise and command.

Harry would bet money that this was where all the magic happened. The computers, labs, the running of the entire park would be done from this building and it was meant to strike awe into the hearts of mere men, just as much as the dinosaurs themselves.

"G'day, g'day, g'day," said Hammond cheerfully, all but bounding up the steps of the building greeting gardeners and construction workers, who answered with tolerant nods and demure 'Señor Hammond's.

Most of the laborers seemed to be locals, talking quietly to each other in lilting Spanish that Harry had trouble following with his limited knowledge of the language. The front atrium was dominated by a huge, and very realistic, plaster model of a tyrannosaur skeleton kept upright by cables and scaffolding.

"Now," said Hammond, leading them up a curving flight of stairs, "This is without a doubt and by far the most advanced amusement park in the world today, and I'm not just talking about rides, everybody nowadays has rides, even Coney Island has rides, no. I'm talking about living biological attractions, so wondrous they'll capture the imagination of the entire planet for years to come."

"So, what are you thinking?" asked Ellie.

"Me?"

"You've got your 'serious thoughts' face on."

"I was thinking that we're out of a job," snorted Alan.

"Don't you mean extinct?" interjected Malcolm teasingly.

"Before we get down to business," Hammond said, soldiering on without paying attention to whether or not his audience was actually paying attention, "There are a few people I want you to meet."

He took them through a set of double doors and into a small auditorium.

"Grandpa!" came the immediate joyful outcry.

"Kids," said Hammond grinning from ear to ear.

His arms were immediately filled with lanky limbs and flyaway hair.

"Did you like the presents?"

"We loved the presents?"

"And the helicopter ride?"

"It was so fun, and when we landed it, was like whoosh!"

"John," protested Gennaro as soon as the kids had broken away from their grandfather, "It was bad enough that you let Dr. Grant bring his son, now you're saddling us with more kids? When are you going to get it through your head that this isn't a weekend excursion? It's a serious investigation about the stability of the park. Your investors, whom I represent, are deeply concerned, and in forty-eight hours if they're not convinced, I'm not convinced. We'll shut you down, John. Do you understand that?"

Hammond waved him off, "You're not going to shut me down Donald, and in forty-eight hours I'll be accepting your apologies."

Harry was examining the other two kids with no small amount of skepticism. The girl was around nine, tall and tanned with a baseball cap not too different from his own covering her blonde braid. She seemed energetic, but Harry couldn't tell if that was from the excitement of travel and seeing her grandfather or if it was actual enthusiasm. The boy was around his age and only a half-head taller than his sister. His hair was a brown-red color but he sported the same blue-green eyes as his sister and grandfather, though he had none of their extroverted nature.

"These are my grandchildren, Timothy and Alexis Murphy. They'll be providing a spot of company while we tour the park and facilities. Lex, Tim, this is Dr. Grant, his son Harry, Dr. Sattler, Dr. Malcolm, and of course you'll remember Donald," Hammond introduced, "It will give you all a chance to spend some time with our target audience, and keep young Harry from being bored surrounded by adults all weekend."

Harry snorted at that, and sighed when Alan and Ellie both shot him twin 'behave' looks.

"Come on everybody, just take a seat anywhere," Hammond instructed, herding them all into the auditorium.

Harry slid into a cushy movie-theatre style seat in the front row, next to Ellie, with the two other kids a few seats away on his other side.

"What the matter with you?" hissed the girl as the lights dimmed.

"I know him," the boy whispered back.

He was staring at Alan with wide-eyed surprise.

"Well sure you do, Grandpa just introduced him," the girl pointed out.

"No, I know him. From before, I mean, I have his book, _The Lost World of the Dinosaurs_. That's Alan Grant."

Harry turned to look at the pair sharply, locking eyes with the boy. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad then? Anyone his age who'd read Alan's book had to really love dinosaurs. He was intrigued.

"Ah," interrupted Hammond, directing Harry's attention to the screen at the front of the auditorium, "Here he comes. Or, well, here I come."

Sure enough there was a recording of John Hammond, dressed in a charcoal grey suit, carrying his trademark cane. It looked like he was mounting a set of stairs and then when he drew level with the group he spoke.

"_Hello_," he said, "_Hello_."

"Say hello," urged John.

"Hello," said Ellie said hesitantly.

On her other side Malcolm was laughing with his eyes again as he waved at the screen.

"_Hello, John_."

"Oh that's right, I have lines—"

"_Well fine, fine I guess. But how did I end up here?_"

Hammond fished a set of cue cards out of his pocket and adjusted his glasses, "W-well, let me show you. But first, I'll need a drop of blood. Your blood," he said reading off the cards.

"_Right._"

The 'John' on screen held out a finger, and Hammond reached over and 'pricked' it, just on cue for a cartoony 'sproing' sound.

"_Ouch, John, that hurt_."

"Relax, John. It's all part of the miracle of cloning."

Hammond was grinning as he moved to take a seat behind them next to Gennaro and on screen the 'Johns' were multiplying, stepping out from behind the original and saying. "_Hello, John_."

"Cloning," muttered Alan, "But DNA extraction from fossilized material has never been able to come up with a full DNA strand."

"Not without massive sequence gaps," agreed Malcolm.

"And where do you get a hundred million year old dinosaur blood?" asked Ellie rhetorically.

"Shh," hissed Gennaro from behind them.

"_Oh, Mr. DNA, where did you come from_?" said the original 'John' on screen.

"_From your blood_," answered a cartoon DNA molecule who flitted around on screen with googley eyes, mickey-mouse style gloves for hands and a thick Texan accent, "_Just one drop of your blood contains billions of strands of DNA. A DNA strand, like me, is a blueprint for building a living thing, and sometimes animals that went extinct millions of years ago left their blueprints behind for us to find. We just had to know where to look._"

The screen changed to depict a cartoon brachiosaur munching on a cartoon tree, and then panned out to zoom in on a mosquito.

"_Millions of year ago, there were mosquitoes just like there are today, and, just like today, they fed on the blood of animals," explained the DNA molecule, "Even dinosaurs. Sometimes, after biting a dinosaur a mosquito would land on the branch of a tree and get stuck in the sap. After a long time, the sap would get hard and fossilized, just like a dinosaur bone, preserving the mosquito inside. This fossilized tree sap, called amber, waited for millions of years until, using sophisticated techniques, Jurassic park scientists extracted the preserved blood from the mosquito inside. And then, bingo. Dino DNA._"

"Well, I'll be damned," said Alan, "That just might work."

"Very clever," agreed Malcolm, in a tone that suggested just the opposite.

"I assure you it does work," said Hammond a bit crossly, "You've seen the evidence of that, and with far better yield than that other technique—what was it again?"

"Loy antibody extraction," answered Ellie absently.

"That's the one," Hammond agreed, "Our geneticists have been able to get the greatest yield of protein, ever recorded using this very technique."

"But there are still gaps, aren't there?"

"Watch the screen," hissed Gennaro annoyed.

"_Thinking machines, supercomputers and 3D simulators, break down the strand in minutes, showing the gaps in the genetic code, we then use the complete DNA of a frog to fill in the holes and complete the code_."

"Mmm, tricky," said Ellie, "Even if only one to two percent of the genome actually codes for functional proteins, just putting any old gene sequence in the non-coding regions could disrupt the promoter regions of functional genes."

"Not to mention you have the transposable elements to consider," added Alan.

"_And now we can make a baby dinosaur,_" said the Texan DNA molecule.

On screen an egg hatched to reveal a full-grown cartoon brachiosaur just like during the mosquito animation.

"Of course, this score and introductory animation is still undergoing revision, there are whole marches being written, very dramatic of course, spared no expense. But that's essentially the basics, and then of course the tour moves on."

A safety bar came down across their laps and the whole auditorium rotated the screen giving way to a window into a lab filled with people in hospital scrubs, lab coats and occasionally white decontamination suits.

The Texan DNA molecule continued to narrate but no one was really paying it any mind.

"This is overwhelming John," Gennaro was saying, "Are these characters, um—auto…erotica?"

Harry held in a sudden snort of laughter, not wanting Alan or Ellie, both of whom were pointing out certain machines and processes to each other, and by extension Malcolm, to ask what was so funny.

"No, no, there are no animatronics in Jurassic Park, those are the real miracle workers behind all this," said Hammond gesturing grandly.

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," cried Alan as they continued to rotate away from the labs without what he would consider sufficient explanation, "How do you interrupt the cellular mitosis?"

"Can't we see the unfertilized eggs?" pleaded Ellie.

"Shortly, shortly," insisted Hammond.

"Well, can't you stop this thing?" asked Alan wiggling against the safety bar.

"I'm sorry, but it's kind of a ride."

"Here, everyone together," said Malcolm, "On three. One—two—"

With a soft grunt of effort Harry, Alan, Malcolm and Ellie managed to push the safety bar up and scurried out of their seats even as the ride stopped automatically and the lights brightened.

The two other kids shared a look and then scurried after them.

"My goodness."

"You can't do that!" protested Gennaro, "Can they do that?"

The door that they'd come through before now led out into a concrete corridor with lots of wide bay windows and an industrial feel. The entrance to the lab was marked with warning signs about tetratogenic substances and wouldn't open without a key card and a pin code.

"Well if you're that insistent," said Hammond, coming up behind them with a wry shake of his head, "I'll introduce you to our lead geneticist and he'll answer your technical questions."

Hammond swiped his card and punched in his code and the stainless steel door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

"Henry, my dear boy," he called out jovially.

"Oh, hello sir," answered a man who was presumably, Henry.

He was of Asian descent, Chinese if Harry had to guess, and was a tall and slender man in his early thirties.

"This is Henry Wu, our lead geneticist," Hammond introduced, "Henry, I've brought you some visitors who want to hear all about your work. Skipped right out of the operations tour ride. If you've got a spare moment won't you answer their questions?"

"Of course," agreed Wu with an easy smile, shaking the adults hands.

All of a sudden Harry found himself relegated back into 'kid' status, as Wu favored him, Tim and Lex, with a benevolent 'ah, children, how cute, hopefully they don't get in the way,' smile.

The lab itself had the sterile medical scent of all labs and hospitals and was without the permeating scent of vinegar that their field lab sported. Computers clicked and machines whirred away and no one paid them much mind, apparently used to Hammond's boisterous interruptions.

Immediately Alan and Ellie began bombarding Wu with complicated questions, that even Harry, who was smart, well-educated, and even liked the technical side of things couldn't always follow.

"We developed and patented the process for the unfertilized eggs with a lot of trial and error, at first we were using unfertilized crocodile ova but we've been getting better results since we switched to synthetics," Wu was saying in answer to one of Ellie's questions.

"Timmy," whispered the blonde girl, nudging her brother, "This is boring. What are they even talking about?"

"Uh—it's kinda over my head, Lex."

"Do you understand then?" she asked, turning and expectant gaze on Harry.

Startled, Harry answered without thinking, "Yeah, a bit."

"Wow," she said, "An even bigger dinosaur nerd than Timmy, that's really something. So what's going on now?"

Tim was flushed with embarrassment and staring at his feet, but still listening intently, a frown of concentration on his face, and, seeing it, for once Harry didn't feel like getting annoyed about being called a nerd.

"Well, from what I can understand," he explained, "Dr. Wu, was able to get a good sample of DNA from the blood they find in the mosquitos because dinosaur blood, like bird blood, has nucleated red-cells. That means that the red blood cells have their 'DNA blueprints' inside them. In mammals you have to look for the white blood cells and there are a lot less of those in your blood."

"Smart kid," said Wu, "That's exactly right."

Harry started a bit, and then flushed, having not noticed the adults stop their conversation to listen to him. He got fond smiles from Ellie, Alan, and, surprisingly enough, even a lazily approving grin out of Malcolm.

"Come on," offered Wu, "Through this door here. I'll show you something really neat."

Wu led them out of the lab through a sliding door with an airlock labeled Hatchery. Inside it was like walking through a wall of water it was so warm and humid and Harry immediately felt the moisture beading uncomfortably along the surface of his skin.

"We keep the temperature here at about ninety-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The oxygen saturation is at thirty-three percent and we've got a relative humidity of one-hundred percent."

"Jurassic atmosphere," said Alan.

"Yes," agreed Wu, "Or at least, we presume so. If any of you feel faint just tell me, it sometimes takes a bit to get used to."

The hatchery was essentially a bunch of artificial nests, carefully labeled, with five or six pale, mottled eggs incubating in soft looking straw or silty sand.

"We used to keep the eggs under a heavy mist, crocodile eggs need to uptake water from their environment after all, but the switch to the artificial eggs made it unnecessary. We rely on thermal sensors to make sure the internal temperature is kept within the optimal ranges and we have machines and hatchery technicians that make sure the eggs are turned every hour."

"Impressive, what's your survival rate?" asked Alan.

"We've bumped it up with the last few batches, right now it's about forty percent," Wu said, "Naturally we're hoping to improve on that even further but this hatchery has produced over a dozen crops of extractions, and two hundred and thirty-eight live animals."

"How long until they fully mature?" asked Ellie.

"It depends on the species but generally the animals reach their full growth in between two and four years so we do have a number of adult animals in the park."

"How many species do you have?" asked Malcolm.

"Ah, at the last count it was fifteen distinct species," said Wu, "But that's changing all the time. Genetics is a very finicky business, and sometimes we think we have a successful extraction of a new species but then problems crop up after hatching, something isn't right or it isn't what we thought, and we have to start from scratch."

"Is anything hatching now?" asked Alan.

"No," said Wu, shaking his head, "We've just done an extraction but, in general, the incubation period runs for two months. But come this way and we'll go into the nursery and you can see the newborns."

The nursery was just as hot, humid and oxygenated as the hatchery and filled with bits of rags and pet-toys scattered across a mulch floor. The walls were thickly padded and there were a number of big incubators like you would see in the nursery wing of a hospital though they were all empty. A young woman in a set of scrubs with long red hair pulled up into a high ponytail was crouched with her back to them.

"What do you have today Kathy?" asked Wu.

"Not much," she answered, "Just the last of the baby raptors."

"Let's have a look at her," said Wu, "We bred three new raptors in the last round of hatching, but this little girl is the runt of the litter."

The animal on the floor was about two feet long and not much bigger than a toddler. It was a dark yellow-green with brown stripes like a tiger. It balanced easily on its hind legs, its long thick tail providing a counter-weight, and cocked its head, bird-like and curious, at the visitors.

"Velociraptor," breathed Alan.

"_Velociraptor mongoliensis_," Wu confirmed with a nod, "The amber we got this little beauty from was found in the north part of China so we've confirmed the subspecies."

Alan bent down to get a closer look at the raptor hatchling and immediately she jumped clean over his head and into Tim's arms.

"Hey!" exclaimed the other boy, wide-eyed, instinctively catching the infant and holding it close to his chest.

"Ah, I should have warned you, these guys can really jump," said Wu, "The adults too, but the babies start jumping as early as four weeks old."

"How old is this one?"

"About six weeks, coming up on seven."

"Is she heavy?" asked Lex.

"No," said Tim reverently, "She's so light, and soft, and warm."

"She's beautiful," Harry said, echoing Tim's tone as he reached out a hand to stroke the knuckle of his index finger along her neck.

The small triangular head was inches from Tim's face, those dark assessing eyes flicking shut, as she made a small pleased noise.

"Will she hurt them?" demanded Gennaro nervously.

"No, no," Wu assured him, "They don't even have egg teeth at this age and their claws are still too soft to do the same kind of damage as a juvenile. Besides, at this age velociraptors are astonishingly friendly and curious."

"It's a typical behavioral characteristic of infant animals who live in social groups," said Alan, "And you say they have no egg-teeth?"

"That's right, they poke holes in the tops of the eggs with their pointed snouts when they hatch and then the nursery staff usually help them out the rest of the way."

"Hmm? But what happens then when they breed in the wild?" asked Alan.

"In the wild?"

"When they make a nest," Alan clarified, "Or have your adult raptors not reached sexual maturity yet?"

"Oh, they can't do that," said Wu, waving Alan off, "It's one of our safety precautions. None of our animals is capable of breeding."

"How do you know that?" asked Malcolm curiously, a strange light in his eyes.

"Well with something as important as population control, obviously we don't leave anything to chance so firstly, all the animals in Jurassic Park are female, we design them that way. Then, before we introduce them into the park setting we irradiate their gonadal tissue with X-rays to make them sterile, just to be sure."

"This whole process seems to be somewhat holey, don't you think?" said Malcolm, "Irradiation is very imprecise, the dosage could be wrong, or aimed at the wrong part of the animal…and as for them all being female, how do you know for sure? Does someone, uh, I don't know go out into the park and lift up the dinosaurs' skirts? And another thing, how do you even tell the sex of a dinosaur anyway?"

"Look Dr. Malcolm," said Wu, a bit impatiently, "We're not amateurs here, we manipulate the dinosaurs chromosomes before we even insert the embryos into the artificial eggs. It's not that difficult. As I'm sure you know all vertebrate embryos are inherently female and it takes a specific hormone emitted at a specific time in the developmental process to make them male. We simply deny them that hormone. So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the animals are all female. And I am absolutely positive they can't breed."

"Well, good for you," said Malcolm, shaking his head.

The little raptor trilled a bit at this assertion, and nudged at Tim's neck, whining plaintively. Tim giggled a bit.

"Stop, that tickles," he scolded the little creature with an adoring smile, "What does she want?"

"She wants you to feed her," said the nursery technician, Kathy.

"What does she eat?" asked Harry.

"Mice mostly," said Kathy, "But don't let this charmer fool you, she just ate."

Harry leaned in to get a closer look and the velociraptor immediately shifted in Tim's arms and stuck her nose into his hair, snuffling softly, hooking a forearm with a delicate wrist and hands tipped with three small claws over the shell of his ear.

"Alan," Harry said, hardly daring to breathe as he recognized the telltale downy fluff of an unfledged bird poking out of the soft pebbly looking skin along the back of her neck and arms, "She's got feathers."

* * *

**AN: **I wasn't really sure where I wanted to end this chapter but this seems to be as good a place as any. Next chapter will have them out in the park itself, not to mention more raptors, so for the people bored of the science-y stuff the action and interaction approaches, not to worry. Still trying to decide if I should have Ed Regis involved in the tour or not *those people who have read the novels please weigh in here* and I hope y'all don't mind I went fusion-style on Lex and book-style for Tim.

I was so happy to see such a positive response to my first couple of chapters and I hope you'll all continue to enjoy. Please leave a review and let me know what you guys think.


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